furnace turkey roasting?
I can’t help with roasting the turkey, but I did find a replacement thermostat. I can’t find a repair manual. If you are handy, most appliances are pretty easy to work on. Just remember to shut off the gas and power.
There is no problem whatsoever with roasting at a higher temperature. Barbara Kafka was the first I heard of to espouse this approach with her book Roasting: A Simple Art, but I’ve seen loads of people talk about it since. See, for example, the Washington Post or The Heart of New England. The upshot is that the bird just cooks faster. It is perfectly juicy and the skin is more crispy. You just have to be very careful with keeping an eye on it. A remote probe thermometer would be ideal.
A few thoughts, and I can’t guarantee results, but this is what I’d do if faced with a similar problem: – Get an oven thermometer and a probe meat thermometer – this is a thermometer that has a probe you can insert into the meat while it cooks. – Get a good stainless roasting pan with a rack. – Defrost your turkey thoroughly, but store it in the fridge with a few ice packs on top of the breast. This will bring down the breast temperature considerably, and help you not overcook the breast meat, which typically cooks before the thigh and leg. – Start your turkey off breast side down in a cool oven with a couple of cups of stock in the bottom underneath the rack. Insert the meat thermometer into the thigh. Cover with foil. Turn your oven on. – When your oven is heated to about 400, open the oven door and leave it open a crack to allow excess heat to escape. Monitor your oven temp. Close and open the door periodically to trap and release heat. – Roast as usual, monitoring the internal temp
Brine your turkey first. This will further reduce any chance of the bird drying out. Butterfly it, and place it on a rack in a roasting pan. Ideally, America’s Test Kitchens places it on a broiling pan, on top of a disposable roasting pan, containing the stuffing. The idea being the juices from the bird drip down into the stuffing via the slots in the broiling pan. At any rate, the bird will cook in almost half the time if butterflied. I too highly recommend a thermometer probe. They do great double duty as a frying thermometer. Speaking of which, if you have a deep enough pot, you can cut up your bird (or have your market do it for you) and fry it as you would a chicken, without the cost of a turkey fryer. If you roast, have a foil tent ready to cover it if the skin gets ahead of your final temp.
Alternatively, you could use this as an excuse to buy a turkey fryer and fry your turkey (with important caveats about that while delicious, frying a turkey can be quite dangerous if done while disregarding safety.
